They used telescopes at multiple sites in the United States and Mexico to study Pluto's thin atmosphere, primarily made of nitrogen, reported Space.com. The research was carried out by the ...

When the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto and Charon in 2015, it revealed two amazingly complex worlds and an active atmosphere on Pluto.

But Pluto's atmosphere is thicker than Triton's ... a postdoctoral researcher at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. An expert on impact craters, Singer is working with Stern ...

according to research to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Discovered in 1930, it was only around 1980 that astronomers began to suspect Pluto might have an atmosphere.

Its thin atmosphere, which consists mostly of nitrogen, has persisted despite the rock-bottom temperatures, but new research suggests that trend may changing, and Pluto’s atmosphere could ...

Pluto's tenuous atmosphere is mainly composed of methane ... For the new calculations, Erwin's team used previously published research from themselves and other scientists.

To play around with this idea, the research team used model simulations of atmospheric chemistry, including the physics of particle settling toward Pluto’s surface. The simulation shows ...

When Charon is positioned between the sun and Pluto, the research indicates that the moon can significantly reduce atmospheric loss. Pluto's relationship with its moon Charon is one of the more ...

Pluto’s atmosphere, though tenuous compared to those of the terrestrial planets, exhibits a fascinating complexity driven by extreme temperatures and dynamic surface interactions. Predominantly ...

But a team at Southwest Research Institute ... amount of nitrogen present on Pluto, and also estimated how much of the element could have escaped out of its atmosphere over the eons.

“There shouldn’t be enough interior heat inside Pluto,” says Kelsi Singer, a geophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute ... would be too cold that its atmospheric constituents would ...